<%@ page import = "jp.ac.utokyo.pinyomi.*" %>
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>

<jsp:useBean id="results" class="jp.ac.utokyo.pinyomi.Results" scope="session"/>
<%
	results.processRequest(request, pageContext);
	String cntx = request.getContextPath();
	String thispage = request.getRequestURI();
%>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/changelists.css">
<title>Pinyomi</title>

</head>

<body class="change-list" onload="init()"> 
<div id="container">
<div id="header">
<div id="branding">
<h1 id="site-name">Pinyomi Dictionary Lookup</h1>
</div>
<div id="user-tools">
<a href="<%=cntx%>/searchjp.jsp">Japanese lookup</a> /
<a href="<%=cntx%>/searchch.jsp">Chinese lookup</a>
</div>
</div>

<div id="content" class="flex">
<h1>Introduction to Pinyomi-lite </h1>
<div id="content-main">

<h1>Background</h1>
<p>Due to the large amount of shared characters and words in Japanese and Chinese,
Japanese are likely to read a Chinese word by kana reading. This phenomenon,
termed as language transfer (or cross-linguistic influences), is very common in
second language acquisition. The language transfer procedure that Japanese try
to transcribe a Chinese hanzi word to a kanji string and give a kana reading is
generally called transliteration, which is an important research topic in
information retrieval. So far, almost all of previous work has been done on
phonogram-based transliteration (e.g. [Flurton Hotel] is translated to [フラト
ンホテル]) .Pinyomi system is the first attempt in the world where
transliteration system is applied to ideograms. 

<p>The Pinyomi system is named after the Chinese word Pinyin(拼音) and  the
Japanese word Yomi(読み). Both of them means prounciation  in Chinese and
Japanese respectively, and we just combine these two words together since
Pinyomi system deal with the word lookup problem between these two langauges. 

<p>Pinyomi is an ongoing project led by  Zhihui Jin . The system was originally
developed in Python by Jin and Lars Yencken. The enchanced version, named as
Pinyomi-lite, was re-designed by Jin and re-written in Java by Jin and Anping
Zhou. 

<h1> Problems in Old Pinyomi system</h1>
<p><b>Unknown Characters</b> Both kanji and hanzi evolves from traditional
Chinese characters.  If a kanji and a hanzi are derived from the same
traditional character, We call them cognate (e.g. 红↔紅). The transliteration
used in old Pinyomi system is cognate mapping between kanji and hanzi.  Since
Japanese and Chinese languages evolve independently, the gap between kanji and
hanzi becomes bigger and bigger. In the history, both Japan and China have
tried to simplify their own characters, and the gap has quickly increased
especially when Chinese government significantly simplified hanzi after 1955,
which resulted in many totally unknown hanzi to Japanese. Consequently, several
problems arise in the old Pinyomi system due to cognate-based transliteration.
Firstly, there are some characters only used in Japanese or Chinese, the
cognate of which doesn't exist in another language.  e.g. "込" and "峠" are
Japanese-only kanji, "乒" and "你" are Chinese-only hanzi.  Secondly, there are
many cognate pairs with quite different shapes, which is unpredictable to users
(e.g. "认↔認").  The knowledge about these cognate mappings should be
accumulated during the language learning process, which significantly decreases
the advantage of Pinyomi system against conventional lookup method.  
Since many hanzi are unknown to Japanese, the problem for us is: given Chinese
words with unknown characters, how Japanese can effectively look up these words
in the Pinyomi system?  e.g. "认, 识, 无, 扫, 专" .

<p><b>Inefficient Architecture</b> The old Pinyomi system construct a query
based on possible readings of a word. It generated all the possible kana
readings for each Chinese word, and stored them in the database. Since each
kanji can have multiple readings, the possible readings for each word could be
huge, which requires large disk space to store them, and result in low efficency 
in word search. 

<p><b>Inflexible Queries </b> Only two types of queries are supported in old
Pinyomi system, a possible word reading, or a kanji sequence using
cognate-based transliteration. But a query combined with kana reading and kanji
is impossible. You will see in the following sections, much more flexible 
queries are supported in the enhanced Pinyomi-lite system. 


<h1> Methods in Pinyomi-lite</h1>
<p>In our current research, we try to design several ways to do transliteration
from unknown hanzi to kanji so that all the unknown hanzi can be reasonably
supported in Pinyomi-lite system.  The core problem lies in how we can effectively
do transliteration from unknown hanzi to kanji, currently we use the following
methods :

<ul>
<li>Using a readable component. Although many hanzi are unknown to Japanese, still
large numbers of hanzi are likely to contain some kanji components which are
still readable to Japanese. As we have shown above, the Chinese word "认识
",belongs to this category. 

<li>Using a similar kanji. When Japanese see an unknown hanzi, sometimes they will
associate it to a kanji due to the shape similarity. For example, given Chinese
word "无数",  hanzi "无" is unknown but very similar to kanji "天", thus we
support the user to search word "无数" by using query "天 数" 

<li>Using a radical variant. For example, in Chinese word "扫描", the first hanzi "
扫" is unknown to the user, however, the left part "扌" is a variant of kanji "
手", thus the user can use "手 描" to look up the word.  

<li>Using stroke information. There are some unknown hanzi which are difficult to
do transliteration by above methods. For example, the first hanzi "专" in
Chinese word "专用". But Japanese can easily tell the number of strokes in 专
is 4, thus the user can use "4 用" to look up the word.  Furthermore, By
dividing basic strokes into 5 categories, h(horizontal 一), v(vertical 丨亅),
l(left 丿), r(right 丶乀), o(other 乙乚乛), each hanzi can be described by
using a partial stroke order.  For example, hanzi "专" can be described by
first 2 strokes as "hh", or 3 strokes as "hho", but not necessarily all
strokes.  Thus word "专用" can be looked up by using query "hh 用" or "hho 用". 
</ul>
  
<p>Also a more flexible way to look up words is  provided. In the first version of
the Pinyomi system, the query must be either a kanji string or a kana string,
the mixture of kanji and kana is not supported. But this is not necessarily the
case; all different methods can be mixed together for the convenience of users.
Given the Chinese word "扫描" as an example, the first hanzi "扫" can be mapped
to "手" via "扌", or "hvh" by using the first three strokes or "6" by using the
number of strokes; the second hanzi "描" may have a kana reading "びょう" or "
えが". Thus all the possible combinations, such as " 手　びょう", "hvh えが",
"6 描", can be used to look up the target word in the future.  

<h1>Meaning</h1>

<p>By effectively integrating several transliteration methods into Pinyomi
system; we produce a more powerful dictionary system, which will become useful
not only for Japanese learners of Chinese, but also for Japanese travelers in
China, and vice versus. Compared to conventional lookup methods, Pinyomi
provides a way for Japanese users to lookup Chinese words by using their
knowledge in native language, thus it will be much more convenient for the
users, especially when they try to lookup a word with unknown characters.
Compared to handwriting recognition electronic dictionaries, Pinyomi provides
more flexible ways to look up a word. Also Pinyomi needs less human labor, the
most important work is the construction of transliteration tables between kanji
and hanzi; while handwriting system needs to collect many training data and
design a complicated learning algorithm. Furthermore, Pinyomi can be small
enough to port to a mobile phone, while handwriting system requires more
storage and computational resources. 

<p>With the increasing cooperation between Japan and China in economical,
political and cultural fields, the demand for studying each other's language
has soared these years. Thus, a useful tool which can help us study each
other's language will facilitate the communication and understanding among the
people in these two countries. Despite of the fact that the language
interaction between Japanese and Chinese is still intensive, these two
languages have been evolving individually and the gap is becoming bigger when
compared to before. Our research in transliteration between kanji and hanzi, as
well as its application in Pinyomi dictionary system, hence becomes even more
meaningful: it is an effort to bridge the language distance between Japanese
and Chinese, with the purpose to alleviate the sufferings in the language
learning process, and with the dream to enhance the communication between Japan
and China.


<h1>Contact</h1> <p> If you have any suggestions on Pinyomi-lite system, send
an email to Zhihui JIN (ZhihuiJin-AT-gmail.com).

</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

